In a typical jaw-dropping article for Rolling Stone Magazine The Real Housewives of Wall Street, Matt Taibbi reveals the shocking practices of the Federal Reserve during the Great Recession.

With the nation staggering, the Federal Reserve took it upon itself to lend trillions of dollars at nearly zero percent interest. Then, as collateral, the Fed took the securities that were bought with the loans. The arrangement meant that if the securities lost money, the Fed would be stuck with the losses but if the securities made money, then the investors would pay back the loans and keep the higher priced security. Privatizing gains, socializing losses, all in an effort to stimulate the economy. Such loans were not made available to everyday folks; only to the important pillars of our economy: Japanese car companies (while bailing out their competitors), Middle Eastern banks (including one later bought by Muammar Gaddafi), tax dodgers in the Cayman Islands (imagine, subsidizing tax evasion), and the spouses of Wall Street executives. No, that isn’t a typo, the wives of Wall Street executives were offered risk free loans guaranteed by you, the taxpayer.

Taibbi looks at the case of Christy Mack and Susan Karches, the wife and widow respectively of the CEO and the late president of investment banking at Morgan Stanley. While Morgan Stanley itself received over $2 trillion in Federal Reserve risk free, subsidized loans, Christy and Susan also received $220 million for their company, Waterfall TALF Opportunity. With the money, the duo bought student loans and commercial mortgages. If the loans or mortgages ever decrease in value, Waterfall effectively will not have to pay back the Fed and let the Fed keep the devalued securities.Continue reading→

In an era in which almost every bank on Wall Street was entangled in financial scandal, millions of Americans are left in an impoverished hole and billions of dollars in wealth has been destroyed, no one has been held accountable.

Today’s article highlights a corrupt government culture in many of the agencies that were supposed to protect Americans from banks like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Particularly, there is a glaring problem at the SEC where a revolving door that sends government employees out into to private practice and then back to the government, blurring loyalties and breeding distortion.

And Wall Street’s punishment for their brazen schemes and artificial financial boom? According to Taibbi: “carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing.”

There is something so deeply wrong and disturbing with the current foreclosure crisis.

Simply: While most of us have some opinion as to the foreclosure mess, many don’t seem to care about the incredible amount of fraud that has occurred and continues to take place each day.

Some argue that people who fail to pay their mortgages, regardless of their reasons, are “deadbeats.” But, what about the fact some of the largest and wealthiest banks are missing documents used to remove people from their homes? And, in our “rocket docket” State of Florida, there are retired judges who are merely rubber stamping the foreclosure papers filed by the lenders’ firms without actually reviewing the merits of each case?

Shouldn’t it matter that many of these cases result in people being forced to leave their homes when the very banks in question can’t even produce the documents needed to prove their case? Isn’t it a bit odd that these wealthy banks are not being subject to the same level of scrutiny?

Or is this politics as usual? After all, many of these banks sold the mortgages of people to “investors” –other banks or trusts. And, many of those trusts do not have the documentation to prove they have the original documents. Wall Street, in fact, was part of this process and made huge sums of money.Continue reading→